It was simple. You grasped your rifle and shuffled forward. It was a dance to the beat of water bottles banged on dry clay, feet shuffling — yours among them: a dance to your own dance, to the loudening frogs’ chorus of small arms fire, the jab of elbows, and slithering nervous yawns. While the entire line halted in a damp neck of tunnel, Lizzie, next in front, tugged at the coiled plasticine of his ears.
Walter busied himself by gnawing hairless knuckles, licking them as once he had Frances’s. By this means he experienced a feeling of lifting away … to Cremorne. Time was so short — life was so short, halting halfway down a finger, midway through an oarstroke — he leapt to a rock and sprinted uphill to the Reillys’ house where he smacked the flimsy letter and demanded an explanation. Why had she written:
Not a moment passes when I fail to think of you in your great struggle …
And so on; whereas before she’d enclosed black sprigs of secret hair, and babbled wildly for pages.
Why?
From grey darkness they inched to lighter shadows of smoky blue, then ascended toe-stubbing steps until far ahead a box of sunlight appeared, so bright that one half seemed to detach itself and oscillate against the other. Here the order was passed down to wait, so they clung to their gear for yet another alarmed minute: cockroaches in the murky recesses of a cupboard.
Then a fresh order flushed them out, and they entered the front line.
A whistled waltz (Lizzie’s) hung in mid-bar, the sunlight hurt, one man was directed to the left, another to the right; Walter’s arm was gripped and pushed by a paw dotted with bristling warts. Part of the rear wall of the trench had collapsed, the white sun flitted harshly between sandbagged horizons, the stench, the dust’s arid penetration. Later Walter would coolly reexamine a dead man’s face that suddenly loomed left of his knee, a face dug clear from the broken wall of trench where during the night the Turks had blown a mine and the man had suffocated. He would recall a fist pathetically bared next to an ear, and study the rigid record of feeling thus imprinted — the shock of a mouth crammed with dirt, the resentment of dented eyelids, the desperation of fingernails black and split from suffocated scrabbling.
Somewhere Major Mason had hailed them from a recessed shelter, the kind used by fettlers in railway tunnels, then slipped out to follow, but that was one, two, three bends back: now Walter’s companion butted him to a halt with a bony shoulder, said “Reg Hurst” bartering for a name in return, withdrawing from their handshake with a definite wiping action, adding in a controlled educated voice, “This was my spot, now it’s to be yours. You’re welcome to it,” between times rubbing eyes translucent as sliced veal. The others, also halted, peeked from the wings. Walter saw the major with the grinning heads of Frank and Bluey sprouting from each shoulder, and in the upward direction, just short of where the trench climbed and turned a corner to nowhere, he saw Lieutenant Bushel and Sergeant Madox conferring humourlessly with Captain Veegan.
Walter immediately felt calm. He waved right and left. The feeling strengthened. Ordinary details met his eye: a feather-tucking bird, a file of black ants, capillary shrub roots in cross-section, and Reg Hurst, the placid organizer, domestically occupied.
Idiotically Walter smiled: “What’s all this for?”
Hurst had been rummaging through a pile of blankets. “They’re in case of bombs. When one comes over we use ’em and hope for the best.” The blanket he passed to Walter held a clear marble of condensation dropped from his nose, through which a nest of safe silvery hairs was magnified. “If there’s time I’ll demonstrate.” Then, spine against the forward wall, he folded his hands around his shins, rested the bristled planes of his face on his kneecaps, and snoozed.
“All set?” called Madox.
“All set?” Walter mimicked along to Frank and Bluey.
After a while Hurst stirred from his doze: “Have you heard of the third of May?”
“Who hasn’t?” No, that was the wrong tone: “Not much,” and located a match to clean his teeth. The place still seemed to have exaggerated its effects. Even the sun had softened, the stink had wandered away, and gosh! it really had been a bird hopping around in the open, a little scrub bird no bigger than a sparrow holding still on the parapet, peering at him, working a delicate note out of its tweezer-like beak.
“We lost half our men,” said Hurst. He studied Walter’s face. “It all happened in a dream, beyond recall.” He sighed, a young man, then shifted on his haunches, glassy eyes searching for a window on sanity with the slick desperation of air bubbles in a spirit level.
Abruptly the scrub bird shrieked again. Then it fluttered from rear trench to front, describing a half circle over their heads: and a Turkish bullet smashed noisily along the curve’s diameter. At this Walter leapt for his blankets, but after attentively cocking an ear Hurst reassured him. He loosened a grey silk handkerchief from his neck and draped it over his face: “Watch for the black cricket balls. Then you’ll know the game’s hotting up.”
Other trenches attended to the routine discharge of firearms, but here the task was simply to wait, and now that the breeze had swung once more around to the Australian line, to try not to gag on the renewed stench. Walter set his pipe frenziedly crackling and sought a return to the orderly illusions of a minute ago: “Do the birds come round all the time?”
No answer.
He wished Hurst would buckle down to an explanation of the trench system. He worried also that the prematurely balding soldier might be too tired and slow even to shift himself should a bomb suddenly flop over. Walter sat there. Fear nibbled and gnawed. That’s all it did — fear had no intelligence, it never explained, nor asked, nor understood. It nibbled and gnawed, took a breather, then started all over again.
The silken mouth articulated: “What did you do before the war?”
“I helped my father on the farm. What about you?”
“I was a teacher. Can you imagine? When the war came I decided I was all books and no life. I don’t subscribe to that theory now.”
Away went the handkerchief, out came his pipe. They exchanged tobacco.
Hurst made a peremptory announcement: “I’m twenty-eight and I’ve got the clap. The old school would be shocked.” He named an eminent college in Adelaide. “Surprised?”
“No, plenty have it,” Walter managed. But the idea affronted him — Hurst’s confession. A teacher.
“My case is not so bad. I got off lightly — for a Christian. I’d never kissed a girl. Never been drunk. Should I be sorry? Look at me, I caned boys who swore.”
Walter looked as instructed, and sure enough found himself frozen under the gaze of a schoolmaster. “I’ll bet you taught science.”
“Maths and divinity. I wasn’t a minister exactly, but near enough. What do you think — God or no God?”
“There’s … something,” muttered Walter. He wanted to put it more strongly: but most of all he wanted Hurst to shut up.
“A cock and bull tale! The body is absolutely the end.”
This was no minister talking. “You must have believed something. Once.”
“I was an expert,” Hurst concluded doubtfully. “Then I looked behind the bloody scenes.”
The sky made new noises. Thunder curved up from the sea and spikes of rushing air descended on hidden gullies to twang horrendously. Walter in a panic said: “Don’t you think we ought to be getting ready?”
“We are.” But even so Hurst sharpened his alertness, crouching and knocking his pipe, glancing left and right, and once even pressing an ear to the floor of the trench. “Quiet as the grave.” The new noises he dismissed as “the Royal Navy’s technique for transporting brass into Turkey.”
“Listen,” the man grabbed his arm: “All that I just told you — it’s bull.”
“You’re still a Christian,” Walter dumbly informed him.
“The whole business. I was never a … minister. It was someone else.”
“Oh.” This was shadow-boxing — shadow-wrestling — the way Hurst switched from silence to sincerity to a malicious twist of identity on the edge of a vast drop. Making a fool of Walter. Then raving ceaselessly.
“Do you read books?”
All right, if Hurst wanted to play games so would he, but seriously, and only to keep his balance. He feigned a recent self, the one he had donned in Egypt but feared he had already left behind like a change of skin. “Lately I’ve read Beauchamp’s Career and half of Shakespeare, and lots of ‘light-weights’” (Ollie Melrose’s phrase). He exhausted his new-found acquaintance with literature, but waved an arm in the air as if dozens more circulated where he had tossed them.
But who was Hurst now? He ranted as though from a platform.
“Books contain too many ideas. They’re bad. A man has an idea, but on its own it’s useless. Good for a laugh. So he sets it down in a book and before long there’s Germany, here’s Britain, great nations founded on great ideals. Have you ever seen a great ideal raise its head except in conflict with another?” He stabbed a finger on the open page of history: “Bang!” and after a pause sniffed theatrically in the direction of no-man’s land: “Books created that mess. Ideas on the move meet bodies that resist them — the poor saps.”
“I don’t follow.”
“The end of thought — ideas in uniform. That’s why we’re here, books. The trouble is that books don’t have bodies in them. That’s the essence, young fella. Books haven’t caught up to the modern world as yet. Put a body in a book. There’s a twist. Ideas could then stroll round hand in hand.” His picture of a world where books did not exist became more and more fanciful. He dropped in bits from Alice Through the Looking Glass as if they were his own. Only nothing he said was funny.
Walter resolved that next time he would smother the sly swervings of the mad before they got started. He lost his patience, tried not to show it, but everything came out: “Hurst, we’ve been here for two hours. Christ, and all you can do, you —” he deleted an insult, “is rave. Put a sock in it!”
The major hopped past.
“Hurst, you magger. Do what the boy says.”
Hurst smiled: “It doesn’t pay to lose your block. No sir.” He shared his water bottle, and the surprisingly rum-scented liquid did its work, forcing from Walter a shamed apology. Close up the man’s face stank. His lips twitched when smiling as if strung from rubber bands. At the roots of his whiskers dirt lay in small clumps like scabs.
Suddenly a double crack of Australian rifle fire leapt from the upper bend of the trench. Straightaway the Turks responded, sending maddened golfers to whip arid divots from the lip of the parapet. Where was fear? This was its antidote! Dust and splinters of gravel rattled downwards. Hurst explained that the shots had been fired by a light horse sharpshooter who after only a day spent ranging this part of the line was known as “The Murderer”. “Bugger him,” said Hurst, cupping his hands and shouting at the unseen sniper: “Stick your head up your arse!” In an aside he said: “No room for Methodists here.” From the supple enunciation Walter could tell he’d long since learned to swear.
“Blankets!” He was in control.
Out on the never-to-be-sighted surface of the earth a sound like the woof of petrol fires gave way to the terse ripping of tinfoil. “The major’s motto is never hold back. I won’t be the odd man out.” Action, it seemed, was the one test he had passed long ago. The strange tricks of his contemplative self were nowhere in sight.
“Hurst?” called the major, “You’re opening bat.”
The first bomb dribbled in. A globe, black and absolute, with a smoking wick.
Hurst leapt and retreated, leaving a magical square of blanket on the ground. For a second the sphere huddled under it, a dangerous lump, while Hurst considered his timing. Then he jumped again to hold the blanket down and the end was announced in a defeated gush of wind and a suppressed sunset.
Though Walter was safe, his fright at the damped explosion caused him to leap and take refuge, foolishly erect, on the nearby fire-step. For an instant his hat appeared above the parapet, presenting to the world a surfacing khaki duck which Turkish snipers spotted from two directions and invisibly printed with X, horizontally across, as it rose and dipped. The bullets as they scored past found an echo in Reg Hurst’s darting whispers: “Christ” in one ear, “Almighty” in the other.
Then more bombs each. Black fruit greedily collected. Limbs in a tangle — once he and Hurst embraced, heads knocking, while fuses gloated.
A rule of physics: bombs roll towards, never away.
A photograph: Major Mason crouched like a circus monkey, blanket at the ready. And at the other swing of the lens, Madox and Bushel with anxious faces.
Hurst’s insanity: “Eggs-a-cook. Hoop, la!”
And at last the trench setting sail: moorings slipped, the wharf sliding backwards. The farewelling bombers holding their length, yet the projectiles striking farther along, near the major’s cubbyhole.
Now Bluey was in the thick of it, a ginger and tan scuffle. Where was Frank? Then Bluey scurried out of sight and the major waddled into view alone.
For a minute nothing happened. The officer found time to fiddle with a stub of cigarette and joke for all to hear that he’d light it from the next bomb. The bomb came, he snuffed it. But it was followed too quickly by a second one which thudded at his heels, then stropped itself out of reach. The major lunged, tripped, spun lengthwise, and sprawled beside the projectile which instantly exploded.
The walls of the trench lit up for a final photograph.
Walter and Hurst huddled unharmed as the fizz of lightning gave way to dust. They spat grit, then spotted a heap of discarded clothing thrown against the rear wall: it was the major. His hat blown clear had flown to the parapet where it sat uncertainly. And on looking closer, his head — bald, unbloodied, sickeningly smooth — balanced on a pulped chest.
Carelessly Hurst ran to him: “Can you hear me?”
“Yes,” bubbled a voice, “do shut up.” A pool of blood lay still and deep in a fold of his trousers.
“I’ll see you through, Alec,” murmured Hurst.
The fateful bomb appeared to have been the last. Now the Turks concentrated on shooting the hat, which shortly slipped to rejoin the man — the corpse — in an absurd trajectory of reconciliation.
“It’s never me,” said Hurst wonderingly.
Except for the tut-tut-tut of distant machinegun fire, all was silence. Then, from the other lines, Walter heard shouted orders in an unknown language. He looked around with a query for Hurst, but something occurred suddenly to smear the man into invisibility. The words rattled against each other as if seeking the right partners … Of course! From the outside of an echoing bucket he understood their malicious intent —
Hands thrust his shoulders down. A stretcher bearer hung over him. He decided to sleep but the man said: “Here’s an aspirin,” and a pannikin striking his teeth woke him properly. “You and Hurst are gluttons for luck.” The man spoke in a Welsh accent: glue-tones.
Where were they?
Blood, smears and slabs of it, covered Walter’s unbuttoned shirt and stomach. The orderly gave him a rag and a dish of eucalyptus-smelling water. While he wiped himself clean he learned the explanation. A final bomb had lodged unnoticed between the dying major’s legs and exploded while he and Reg Hurst knelt on either side. It had knocked them out, painted them with blood, but otherwise left them unhurt.
“This here’s the late major’s pozzie,” said the orderly. “You’re to kip here till you come properly round.” He spoke resentfully. It hadn’t been his idea. But he handed over a packet of papers and a generous pinch of tobacco. As soon as he left, a sealed cauldron in Walter’s stomach blew its lid — he vomited hot amber-coloured liquid onto the hardpacked floor, where it wandered acridly close to his face (there was no ledge: he sprawled on the ground itself).
Only then did Walter take note of his surroundings. At first the place seemed vast as a shed, but detail after detail shrank it in, until a hastily-piled heap of sandbags, the “door”, nudged his elbow, the roof sagged dangerously low, and the back wall, an oblong gallery of harried pick marks, seemed close to collapse.
The gully outside echoed with wind, loose canvas snapping to a curve, a distant explosion. But echoes are never all sounded. Something fluttered at his elbow, someone, a face in a photograph — the major’s wife — her picture propped on a shrine-like shelf where a stub of candle and three folded white handkerchiefs exuded the odour of beeswax and lavender. Dark hair (rang the echo) hooded eyes.
The same as Frances’s.
The person who now spoke a lost girl’s name in this cramped place was surely mad. The relic curled in his hand; he straightened it against the wall where light fell softly. He apologized to — nothingness — for the pride that had coolly siezed him when the dead prefect appeared, for the way he had gloated over being alive. The selfsame pride that had surveyed the crazed George Mullens, dispassionately scanned his notebook, and later raged at Reg Hurst … Sorry.
Gone was his competence for the simplest task of hope, the placement of one thought forward of another. Frances rustled alongside — lavender, lavender and white — she took his finger as might a child and stifled a giggle at the enormity of their bumping climb upstairs to a hotel room hardly bigger than this one.